[wplug] Serial killer

[Zachary Uram]

On 5/12/05, Vance Kochenderfer <vkochend at nyx.net> wrote:
> My parents have been having trouble with their external serial modem.
> It reportedly worked fine last Friday, but when they went to go online
> Saturday morning, no go.  I've spent a bunch of time with them on the
> phone (from a couple hundred miles away) trying to diagnose the trouble,
> but have hit a brick wall.  They're using Mandrake 10.1 (kernel 2.6.8).
> 
> The modem simply won't respond to commands.  KPPP has a nifty "Query
> Modem" function that sends a series of ATI commands to the modem.
> This causes the modem lights to flicker, but no response comes back.
> Trying an ATZ or any other AT command in a terminal likewise gets no
> reply.  I suspected the modem could have died, but I had them put on
> an old modem I had left at their house, and we get the same results.
> 
> My next suspicion was a serial port problem, but dmesg and a
> setserial -a /dev/ttyS0 both show normal values.  Permissions on
> /dev/ttyS0 are correct.  There's only one serial port, so I know
> it's the right device.  It's properly enabled in the BIOS.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas for further diagnosis I can do remotely (with
> non-computer literate people on the other end)?  Or alternatively, if
> it turns out the serial port is bad, anyone have a PCI modem that
> works under Linux they'd like to unload?  Thanks a bunch.

is irq sharing enabled?
have they installed any new hardware recently?
sorry can't be more helpful, sounds like a tough one!

zach

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